Posts by: Joerg Blumtritt
An algorithm is a structured description on how to calculate things. Some of the most prominent examples of algorithms have been around for more than 2500 years like Euklid’s algorithm that gives you the greatest common divisor or Erathostenes’ sieve to give you all prime numbers up to a given maximum. These two algorithms do [...]
Last weekend the 4th Conference on Quantified Self took place in Amsterdam. Quantified Self is a movement or direction of thought that summarizes many aspects of datarization of the live of people by themselves. The term “QS” was coined by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, who hosted the conference. Thus it cannot be [...]
Our senses are adapted to detect of our environment, what is necessary for our survival. In that way, evolution turns St. Augustin’s postulate of our world as being naturally conceivable to our minds from its head onto the feet. What we define as laws of nature are just the mostly linear correlations and the most [...]
There is a reason why we differentiate science and the humanities. And although sociology, experimental psychology and even history nowadays deploy many scientific methods, the difference is still fundamental. Humantites deal with correlations; the causalities are way further speculative than the “laws of nature” that are formulated in physics or chemistry. Also the data that [...]
Our brain is wired to experiencing the world as one consistent model of reality. New data we interpret either as confirmation of the model or as an update to replace one of its parameters with a new value. Our sensory organs also reduces the incoming stimuli, drop most of the impressions, preprocess what is identified [...]
“My market research indicates that 50% of your customers are above the median age. But the shocking discovery was that 50% were below the median age.”
(Dilbert; read it somewhere, cant remember the source)
It was funny to see everyone at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference talk about data science and hear just the dinosaurs like [...]
In computer science we have learned that we can do with non-linear models only in very unlikely examples. Not only our machines – also our minds are not capable to foresee non-linear developments. One of the achievements of Mandelbrot’s works and the ‘Chaos Theory’ is that we now better understand how this works and that [...]
Chess is a game that does not depend from chance. Every move can be exactly valuated mathematically, and in theory we can calculate the optimal strategy for both colors from any arbitrary position up to the end of the match.
Interestingly there is hardly any “intelligent” chess program. Almost everything that was coded during the [...]
Just a few hours before the ballots open for the 57th presidential election, the key question for us data scientists is: which data set could really show some special information, that would not be easily available through a classic poll. We have already seen some interesting correlations of Wikipedia usage with the ongoing campaign [...]
It took a while for the three Vs of Big data to take off as one of the most frequently quoted buzzwords of BigData. Doug Laney of Meta Group (now aquired by Gartner) had coined the in his paper on “3-D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity and Variety” in 2001. But now, with [...]
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
e. e. cummings, what if a much of a which of a wind
Open data is great. The National Digital Forecast Database offers free access to all the [...]
Archive.org celebrated their crossing the mark of 10 Petabytes data stored.[1] The non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, has been following its mission to archive the Internet and provide universal access to all knowledge since 1996.
The number of 1016 might look impressive (and if we remember typical server storage capacity 10 years [...]
Earlier this month, the TechAmerica foundation has published their comprehensive reader “Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide To Transforming The Business of Government”.
Lobbying politicians to follow the Big Data path and support the industry by issuing the necessary changes in education and research infrastructure is a just and also obvious goal of [...]
Memes – images, jokes, content snippets that get spread virally on the net – have been a popular topic in the Net’s pop culture for some time. A year ago, we started thinking about, how we could operationalise the Meme-concept and detect memetic content. Thus we started the Human Meme Project (the name an [...]
The future of advertising after Siri – or: posthuman advertising.
by Benedikt Koehler and Joerg Blumtritt
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time. (Terminator 2: [...]
- Beautiful Data - Musings on Big Data, Network Science and Information Visualization by Benedikt Koehler and Joerg Blumtritt
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